Choosing the Right Hearing Aid

• There are many hearing aid choices.

It all boils down to what your hearing loss and lifestyle requires, as well as what you want to use your hearing aids for.

There are many factors that we will consider and discuss with you when selecting the right hearing aids for you.  Please read about some of these below:

• Clear Sound and Hearing Comfort

Sound quality is really important. All hearing aids have to process the sound you hear.  They have to pick up sound with their microphones, work out which pitches to amplify so you can hear them, amplify the sound correctly and then put it into your ear via a speaker (well, that’s the short version of how they work!). We ‘tune’ your hearing aids using a special computer programme to specifically suit your hearing loss so the sound you hear is as natural as possible and as close to normal hearing as possible.  If the hearing aids are not tuned optimally, the sound clarity and hearing comfort will be compromised and the aids just won’t work as well for you as they should.

• Automation and Convenience

Hearing aids are basically tiny computers.  They constantly assess all the sounds their microphones pick up and some can automatically adjust themselves to suit the situation you’re in without you having to do anything! Imagine you’re sitting in a café with a good mate trying to hold a conversation.  The acoustics at cafes are usually terrible, so it’s likely the sound will be echoing and bouncing off the walls, making your friend’s voice muffled and unclear.  Your hearing aids will also pick up these same sounds, but, they will be able to filter out some of the background noise and echo whilst at the same time enhancing your friend’s voice.  This helps your brain to focus more easily on what you want to hear and ignore the rest.

How automated you want your hearing aids to be is up to you. Some people don’t want to have to do anything to the hearing aids, they want to put them on and pretty much forget they’re wearing them.  Other people like to feel they have some control over how the hearing aids operate.  Either way is fine, as it’s just personal preference. 

• Please read more about some of the features that provide convenience and automation in today’s hearing aids:

Directional Microphones – these focus on sound coming from in front of you and dampen down sound coming from the sides and behind you.  This technology helps you to understand conversations in noisy situations like cafes. 

Digital Noise Reduction – this is an automatic system where the hearing aid will reduce the volume of any sound it determines is a constant ‘noise’.  For example if you were standing next to a piece of machinery that had an engine running.  Your hearing aids would listen to this sound, realise it was fairly constant and wasn’t speech, and would dampen it down to make it less distracting and more comfortable for you.

Impulse Noise Reduction – this technology automatically smoothes short impulse type noises such as dishes banging together or a door slamming and is designed to improve listening comfort.

Wind Noise Reduction – You know that whooshing noise you hear when wind blows across a microphone?  Well, you don’t want that to happen to your hearing aids every time you go outside.  This technology automatically reduces that whooshing noise so listening outdoors is more comfy.  This technology is an absolute must for keen golfers, bowlers, walkers etc.

Feedback Management – Remember Poppa’s hearing aid whistling?  He needed this technology!  This system automatically reduces or eliminates annoying whistling that can sometimes occur with hearing aid use.

Bluetooth/Wireless Connectivity – many hearing aids can now connect wirelessly to devices such as cell phones, iPods or other MP3 players, computers and TVs.  This clever technology significantly reduces sound distortion or interference and means you can hear your phone conversations in both ears at the same time, plus you don’t have to take out your hearing aids if you want to listen to music as your hearing aids become your headphones.  A very convenient development.

Data Logging – this is where the hearing aids automatically record information about what they’ve done – how they worked in different situations, how many hours they were used, what type of environments they were in etc.  All of this information can be accessed by us at your fine-tuning appointments which follow the fitting of your hearing aids and it helps us to make sure we’re tuning the hearing aids correctly for you. 

As you can see there are many different features available.  And that’s a good thing because every person is different and has different hearing needs; therefore we need lots of options to give you the best chance of making your life a happier one. 

• Lifestyle

You might lead an active life filled with plenty of physical activity and diverse listening situations.  If so you’ll need hearing aids that can react quickly and that have plenty of features to suit so you can rely on them to keep up with you.

On the other hand, you might lead a fairly quiet life where you’re rarely in a noisy situation and most of your listening is in quiet situations.  For you, simple hearing aids without too many bells and whistles might do the trick very nicely.

Or, your life might be a combination of the two described above where sometimes you’re non-stop on the go and other times you’re less busy.

Did you know there are now water-proof, water-resistant and dust-proof hearing aids available? Perfect if you’re a keen fisherman or sailor and often get damp or wet when out on the water, or you work in a really dirty and dusty environment. So it is important to consider your work situation and your hobbies when choosing hearing aids.

As we’ve said before – everyone is different and is regularly in different listening situations.  Thank goodness we now have such a range of options for people to choose from!